Graphic Design

DIY GRAPHIC DESIGN

In this ever-evolving digital age, church communications often means wearing multiple hats — adding a bit of graphic design prowess to your skillset can deepen your materials’ impact and reach. Here are some helpful tools to get you going.

Graphic Design Software & Training

Free Software

  • Canva.com w/ Affinity (NEW in Sept 2024!)
    Cost: FREE
    Difficulty: Medium

    Use Canva's drag-and-drop features and layouts to design great graphics. Step-by-step tutorial for church communications using Canva by ReFrame Media/ChurchJuice.

  • Crello (Now VistaCreate)
    Cost: FREE
    Difficulty: Easy

    More than 30,000 templates and animated objects makes it easy to design graphics and animations. Easily save and post to social media or website.

  • GIMP.org
    Cost: FREE
    Difficulty: Hard

    GIMP.org is "a cross-platform image editor available for GNU/Linux, OS X, Windows and more operating systems. It is free software, you can change its source code and distribute your changes. Whether you are a graphic designer, photographer, illustrator, or scientist, GIMP provides you with sophisticated tools to get your job done. You can further enhance your productivity with GIMP thanks to many customization options and 3rd party plugins."

  • Pixlr Photo Editor
    Cost: FREE
    Difficulty: Medium

    What you'd expect from a normal photo editor, from cropping and re-sizing to removing red-eye and whitening teeth. If you're used to using Photoshop, then you'll find Pixlr's user interface easy to pick up quickly, as it's very similar. Free app is available in both iOS and Android varieties.

  • Sumopaint
    FREE for beginner version; $19 for Pro
    Difficulty: Medium

    Similar to Photoshop, Sumopaint works on a web browser platform, without the need to download or install software. All the standard features you'd expect from a desktop tool are present (and by buying the Pro version for $19 you can install a desktop version of the app if you prefer).

  • Infogr.am infographics
    Cost: FREE
    Difficulty: Medium

    Great way to create charts and graphs. "Infogr.am is a great free tool which offers access to a wide variety of graphs, charts, and maps as well as the ability to upload pictures and videos to create cool infographics. Customizing the data that makes up the infographic takes place in an Excel style spreadsheet and can easily be edited, watching the software automatically change the look of the infographic to perfectly represent your data."

Professional Software

  • Adobe Creative Suite
    Cost: $$$ (Discounted rate through TechSoup)
    Difficulty: Hard

    Used by professional graphic designers, Adobe offers a “software suite of graphic design, video editing, and web development applications… Each edition consists of several Adobe applications, e.g., Photoshop, Acrobat, Premiere Pro or After Effects, InDesign, and Illustrator are the industry standard applications for many graphic design positions."

  • Figma
    Cost: $ ($15/month)
    Difficulty: Hard

    This software has become popular with designers, and for a time was seen as a major competitor to Adobe (Adobe recently bought Figma for $2 billion). Its focus is on graphic and web design, and has a steep learning curve.

  • Photoshop Elements
    Cost: $ ($30 through TechSoup)
    Difficulty: Moderate

    A raster graphics editor for entry-level photographers, image editors and hobbyists. It contains most of the features of the professional version but with fewer and simpler options. The program allows users to create, edit, organize and share images.

  • CorelDraw
    Cost: $ ($99 for home & student suite which is reportedly approved for use by churches)
    Difficulty: Moderate

    "Corel's Graphics Suite, which bundles CorelDraw with bitmap-image editor Corel Photo-Paint as well as other graphics-related programs. The latest version is designated X8 (equivalent to version 18), and was released in March 2016. CorelDraw is designed to edit two-dimensional images such as logos and posters. (Wikipedia).

  • Quark
    Cost: $$
    Difficulty: Hard

    QuarkXPress is a software for layout design, from single-page flyers to magazines, newspapers, etc.

  • LiveSwap
    Cost: $ ($9/month)
    Difficulty: Easy

    Similar to Canva, but built specifically for churches and nonprofits, LiveSwap features an easy-to-use web-based design editor, pre-made templates, and seamless integration with social media.

Training

  • PHLEARN on YouTube: An excellent, free resource for training on all things Photoshop, Lightroom, and video

  • Lynda: From LinkedIn, Lynda offers a free month with classes on design, business, photography, and more (Many public libraries also offer long-term, free Lynda memberships.)

STOCK IMAGE RESOURCES:

  • thestocks.im: Best free stock resource I've found to date! Over 830,000 free stock photos, vectors, and art illustrations.

  • All-Free-Download: Lots of great free vector files.

  • CreationSwap: You can get 3 free images every 30 days. Very good transitional slides for your TV, and it saves you the time you would have spent creating them. They also have short videos that could be used in Episcopal churches in a couple different ways (specific ministries, team meetings, etc.) The slides are psd files, so you can customize them with your church info; bonus!

  • Creative Commons: Search publicly available images

  • Death to the Stock Photo: A cache of free images, which you can use anywhere you like.

  • Flickr: Note: only photos with the Creative Common license may be used for free with proper attribution. Go to "advanced search" and click the checkbox to show creative commons only to search useable photos.

  • Free Images: More than 400,000 free images and illustrations.

  • Free Digital Photos: Download free images and illustrations for websites, e-books and other online pursuits.

  • Freerange stock: Beautiful photos, free of charge.

  • Gratisography: Free high-resolution images you can use for all your projects. Categories include animals, objects, people and nature.

  • iStockphoto: Millions of royalty-free images, illustrations, videos, and music clips at good prices.

  • Morguefile: More than 350,000 free images for commercial use.

  • Pexels: Free stock photos

  • Pixabay: More than 700,000 free stock images, illustrations and vectors.

  • PicJumbo: Free stock images in your inbox.

  • Story Blocks: Unlimited downloads of high-quality, royalty-free photos, vectors, illustrations & other design elements. $99/year.

  • Unsplash: Free, high-resolution photos you can use anywhere.

OTHER RESOURCES

  • Church Media Drop: Lots of free slide designs (especially seasonal for Advent & Easter). Other tutorials and resources available as well.

  • CreativeMarket: 6 free downloads each week and lots of reasonably priced templates.

  • IM Creator: A curated collection of free web design resources.

  • Piktochart: A nice-looking, free infographic builder with an easy drag-and-drop format. Make quick slides for social media with this great tool.

GRAPHIC ICONS

  • Entypo: The site contains “411 carefully crafted premium pictograms by Daniel Bruce.”

  • Find Icons (Now Free Images): This website has more than 475,450 free icons to choose from.

  • Flaticon: The site has more than 457,000 vector icons to peruse.

  • Graphic Burger: Icons neatly categorized for easy discovery.

  • Get iconjar: Premium icons for free.

  • Iconmonstr: Browse 262 collections of unique designs.

  • Noun Project: Nearly a million curated icons, “created by a global community.”

FONTS

  • DaFont: one of the most popular free font websites in the world. You can use the search feature, or you can look for a font you like by browsing through the different categories.

  • Font Squirrel: is a great resource for free, high-quality, commercial-use fonts.

  • workmark.it: helps you choose fonts by quickly displaying your text with the fonts on your computer.

BULLETIN ART

THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH LOGOS

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